Werner Herzog has two faces, both wearing the same expression of grave forbearance. To some, he is the formidable adventurer-auteur whose cinematic odysseys, such as Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of God, doubled as life-imperilling expeditions for cast and crew. Millions of others know him only from his work in front of the camera, as a villain in Jack Reacher or as the mysterious Client in the Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian.
Herzog turns 82 tomorrow, but ask him how he feels about a career spanning more than six decades and he will protest. “I had no career,” he says, squinting into his webcam from a book-lined office in his Los Angeles home. “I had a wild slalom at way too high a speed and temperature, with rocks and trees that I didn’t collide with – and I didn’t perish.”
That’s one way to put it. He has been around the block, to the ends of the earth, up the mountain and down the other side. In the case of Fitzcarraldo, about a crazed, single-minded genius who dreams of building an opera house in the middle of the Amazon, he did it all with a steamboat in tow. Many of Herzog’s films concern crazed, single-minded geniuses. Self-portraits, some might say.
There is so much potential ground to cover with him that it is possible to feel overwhelmed even before he has greeted you in that solemn, emphatic but soothing voice. Yet he has covered this ground so often, whether in his 2022 memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All or in thousands of interviews, that the stories are as familiar to us now as our own histories, if likely a good deal more dramatic: his childhood in wartime Munich with his Nazi parents; how he stabbed his brother during a squabble over a pet hamster, and nearly died in northern Africa of an acute parasitic disease; how he hypnotised the cast of his film Heart of Glass, or cooked and devoured his own footwear as part of a bet, an act captured in the short film Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. “A grownup man should eat his shoes once in a while,” he later reflected.
But it is literature rather than cinema that has occasioned our conversation today. “No one else writes like me,” he says bluntly. “My writing will outlive all my films. I am certain as certain can be. Film-making is my voyage but writing is home.”
He is about to publish Mexico, a screenplay he wrote in the 1990s about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. The costs of producing an epic with spectacular special effects, battle scenes, galleons and thousands of extras were prohibitively high back then. They remain so even in our era of CGI.
“To make a film like this, you have to be in the league of your last film earning $250m domestic in the US,” he says. Those just aren’t Herzog numbers, not even when his movies hit big. His doolally thriller Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, starring Nicolas Cage as a drug-addled cop who hallucinates breakdancing ghosts and singing iguanas, took $10m worldwide. Grizzly Man, his documentary about the environmentalist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a bear, grossed just under half that.
Of course, James Cameron would have no trouble making Mexico. “He wouldn’t even have to ask for the money,” Herzog concedes. “And that’s OK. I can live with that.” As he writes in the foreword to the screenplay: “I have spent not one sleepless night over the fact that I could not realise this project.”
Why did he want readers to know that? “Because normally people ask, ‘Isn’t it terrible that you could not make that film?’ And my answer is: it happens. I made something like 20 films in the last 20 years. There’s unfinished business out there, but so be it.” He says it’s impossible to know how close Mexico came to being a reality. “You cannot speak in yardage. Francis Ford Coppola wanted to do it with his company, American Zoetrope, but it never materialised.” He also waves away any talk of potential casting ideas. “Your question points in the direction of a film, and I dislike it, because what we have here in front of us is literature. There is a text, and nothing else.”
What a text, though. Screenplays can make for dry reading but Mexico fully evokes an entire civilisation, as well as the bonkers movie that might have been. Fleets of ships burn on the coast, and there are stage directions for frogs, goats and ocelots. When a bridge collapses under the weight of thousands of people, one character makes a gruesome escape across the carnage: “Incredibly, his very long lance clutched horizontally before him, Alvarado reaches the breach at top speed, impales the wriggling mass of bodies, and pole vaults himself to safety,” writes Herzog.
The urgency puts one in mind of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, which followed 16th-century Spanish conquistadors searching for El Dorado but felt closer to documentary than period piece. “I write screenplays fast,” he says. “I see a film happening before me as if you were in a screening room trying to note down everything while it’s being projected.” Aguirre was written that way, punched out in two days. “Some of it I wrote when I was on a bus on tour with my football team, and they were all drunk and chanting obscene songs. The goalkeeper vomited over my little typewriter that was on my knees. Two or three pages were beyond repair, so I threw them out of the window. I never remembered what was on them.”
Mexico runs on that Herzogian immersion and immediacy. “As you see, it is written exactly from the perspective of the Aztecs. For them, these are aliens landing at their shores, descending from the clouds, and they ride on miraculous stags – that is, horses – and they create thunder and lightning from steel pipes, meaning muskets.” It is not until page 91 that anyone even voices the suspicion that the invaders may not be gods after all.
This is roughly at the end of the second act, but don’t let Herzog catch you saying so. He is unsparing in his contempt for terms like “backstory”, “three-act structure” and “inciting incident”, and holds in disdain the lucrative screenwriting industry that spawned them. “Utter, utter nonsense,” he huffs. “Counterproductive. There’s more to storytelling in cinema than fixed strategies and structures. This is why much of the film industry has become so formulaic and predictable.”
He despises film schools too, and used to stage his own rough-and-tumble version in response: the Rogue Film School, a series of irregular workshops in outdoor locations. (The suggested reading list included Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain.) He invited applications from budding film-makers who had “worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum”, then taught them to pick locks and forge shooting permits.
Though Herzog abhors formula, his own dalliances with Hollywood seem to have filled him with delight. Playing a baddie opposite Tom Cruise in Jack Reacher was a breeze. “A villain is something that comes easily to me. When you look at Jack Reacher, I’m so frightening. My wife has friends in Paris who saw it. They called her and said, ‘Lena, are you married to that man? You know, you’re only one overnight flight away from us. We can give you shelter!’ Hearing that, I knew I was good. Although, as my wife will testify, I am a fluffy husband.”
He has certainly been fluffy company today. As we prepare to say our goodbyes, I wish him a happy birthday, which prompts a rueful smile. “I don’t think of age in terms of years,” he says. “I count it by films, ‘Ah, that was the year I made Signs of Life’” – his 1968 debut feature about three German soldiers – “or ‘That was when I did Into the Abyss’” – his 2011 documentary about American prison inmates on death row. “Sometimes I feel I’ve aged five or 10 years in a single week. Time is not linear for me, it’s convulsive, so birthdays are meaningless.”
Then he corrects himself. “Well, it does have some meaning, because I know I shall have a wonderful barbecue with friends.” Will there be party games? A piñata? “No, no. There will only be two friends. Three maximum. We will rant and rave and there will be a good bottle of wine and the lamb chops will be sizzling.” At least shoes aren’t on the menu this time.
